From Users to (Sense)Makers: On the Pivotal Role of Stigmergic Social Annotation in the Quest for Collective Sensemaking

All right, hello everyone. It's August 12th, 2022, and we are in guest stream number 26.1 from users to sense makers on the pivotal role of stigmatic social annotation in the quest for collective sense making. This should be a great presentation and discussion, and so I'll pass it to Ronan to introduce the context and take it away with the presentation. So thanks everyone for joining, and Ronan and Will, thanks for coming on. Awesome. Yeah, thanks Daniel for putting this on and yeah, excited to be here and have this discussion. I think it's our first time discussing this paper in like long form, so looking forward to it. So yeah, this paper actually goes for some context. This presentation will be related to the paper that we wrote together as a group. And yeah, it was also presented in a conference on hypertext and social media in June of this year in Barcelona. So today we'll go over kind of the key points of the paper and try to dive into more details, kind of explore directions that we didn't maybe have time to address in a sort of short kind of presentation of paper of the conference. And then we'll sort of open a wider discussion, talk about how this is sort of informing the work of our collective and discussion of some initial projects that we're working on in the context of this research, including active inference and some other projects like a few more. So yeah, looking forward to a lot to talk about. So yeah, we'll see. So there's this kind of incoming stream of sense data coming from the environment. And we have to sort of adapt and handle this kind of stream of data to inform our decisions, incorporate it to our decision-making process. So yeah, so sense-making is a kind of fraught subject in terms of like where collective sense-making comes into play. Because there's this kind of feeling or there's, you know, a lot of people talking about how democracies are in danger and they make reference to sense-making, some kind of, a kind of typical sort of thing you might hear from, you know, media, you'll hear things like this quote we brought here. So yeah, the quality of our democratic life depends on the public having the facts and being able to make sense of them. And there's this feeling that this isn't really happening anymore. So that's why a lot of people are worried about the future of democracy. This is just kind of an interesting research here on the right. It's showing how polarized and how like, how much we don't have a shared sense. So you can look at things like, you know, the topics people are looking at and seeing on CNN or Fox News and see like how different the coverage is of each of those networks for the same topics. So yeah, so things like Trump's failures will get a lot of, a lot of being addressed like very heavily in CNN, but not seeing much on Fox and then vice versa. So yeah, people are living in a really different world because of our information environments. So this is kind of the motivating background for why we're, why we're getting interested in this, because really our democracies are at stake as a lot of people have already noticed. And yeah, just kind of another word of sort of disclaiming that sense making is a wicked problem. And yeah, we definitely aren't going to claim to have like these solutions to sense making or collective sense making. It will require many different solutions. And it's kind of an ongoing problem. So we'll kind of make progress on it, and then we'll have new problems as we have progress. It's very interdisciplinary. There's a lot of stakeholders, different sort of schools of thought that and practice that will need to be involved. So we're looking at kind of, we're trying to look at one angle that we think is really important. And that is how platforms shape our information landscapes online. And we kind of noticed two things, two sort of important things about platforms that make them what we call it perilous. So for one, there's the notion of essential as…